US Precision-Medicine Proposal Sparks Questions
By Sara Reardon,
Nature
| 01. 22. 2015
Untitled Document
With the pipeline of traditional drugs drying up, researchers are increasingly attempting to customize treatments based on a person's genetics or environment. Now the US government wants to get in on the act.
During his State of the Union address to Congress on 20 January, President Barack Obama announced a programme called the Precision Medicine Initiative. “I want the country that eliminated polio and mapped the human genome to lead a new era of medicine — one that delivers the right treatment at the right time,” he said.
The White House is remaining tight-lipped about the details of the programme, declining to answer questions from Nature — as is the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is expected to be a key partner in the effort. But Kay Holcombe, senior vice-president for science policy at the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) in Washington DC, says that her conversations with the NIH suggest that the agency will seek to match genome information with many other types of data, such as health records and blood-test results.
The agency seems to...
Related Articles
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Elizabeth Chuck, NBC News | 07.09.2024
A Netflix docuseries has put a spotlight on the unregulated world of sperm donation, particularly the lack of stopgap measures that might prevent donors who have been banned by one country from simply going elsewhere to donate more.
Released earlier...
By Amanda Becker and Shefali Luthra, The 19th | 07.08.2024
Image by Duke University Archives from Flickr
Republicans have adopted a slate of policy positions ahead of next week’s convention that does not call for a federal legislative abortion ban, but opens the door to establishing fetal personhood.
The Republican...
By Isabelle Bartram
| 07.17.2024
Image by Kuzzat Altay from Unsplash
Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority in China, are mainly located in the autonomous region of Xinjiang. The Chinese government has pursued an aggressive settlement policy in this region since 1949, with the percentage of Han Chinese in the region increasing from five to forty percent in the second half of the 20th century. Since 2014, the Uyghurs have been subject to persecution and re-education – various sources have estimated that at least one million...